Zodiac

This is one of those movies where it's pretty obviously doing whatever it's doing very precisely- Fincher is apparently a director who is obsessed with getting things exactly as he intends them, and it comes across in pretty much every aspect of the movie. What's hard to get at is what it is that he's doing; most viewers know going into it that the Zodiac was never caught, and the recreations of the killings stop about a third of the way into the running time. After that, it's following the investigators, as they follow up lead after promising lead, and run into nothing.

I think that's what the movie is getting at, in the end; certainly someone did the crimes, but the link between investigation and guilt is tenuous, far more so than in most procedurals. It's not because the cops aren't competent- they're quick, imaginative, and dedicated- and it's not because people give up- the movie spans decades, and the main character sacrifices his family to his obsession with finding the truth. It settles on a killer, in the end, but of course there is no proof of his guilt, and it is mentioned in the post script that he was disqualified with DNA evidence. So what are you left with?

In a way, it's a deconstruction of the procedural genre: in most, people find clues, follow up on the clues, and the clues lead them somewhere. The road might be twisty, or they may never actually convict anybody, but you are confident that the tools achieve what they claim they will. In Zodiac, nothing proves anything: handwriting analysis is unscientific, since while the movie respects the underlying procedure, it points out that different experts have different conclusions, which is not the scientific method. The lone fingerprint is either relevant or irrelevant depending on which suspect one favors. The tensest moments come from investigations that lead nowhere, with the sudden realization that almost anyone fits the clues at hand. It's a procedural in which the procedures conflict, each station has its own clues and its own suspects, and nothing is really certain.

This could be presented in an unbearably irritating way- the cop movie as postmodernist shifting sands and decay- but it's not, really. It doesn't try to convince the viewer that there is no truth, just that the quest for it may be futile, unwinnable. The noble hero comes off as bordering on autism before he sets off on his journey, and his personality doesn't alter much. It's a movie about failing, and the quixotic refusal to accept failure is both laudable and tragic.